The mood is mellow and quiet at the GOP election party at the Capitol Plaza in Montpelier on Tuesday evening as nearly 40 people gathered to watch poll results close to 9 p.m. / EMILY McMANAMY/Free Press

On Election Night last week, Lt. Gov. Phil Scott stood on stage at the Republican Party gathering in Montpelier as the only winning statewide candidate in the room.

“It’s not easy being a Republican here in this state,” Scott told the sparse crowd.

Indeed, it was very difficult to be a Republican in Vermont this election year and it appears to be growing more difficult with each passing election.

In this state that was once solidly Republican, political scientist Eric Davis ventures that Vermont might have seen its last Republican governor when Jim Douglas left office in January 2011.

“Jim Douglas might end up being Vermont’s last Republican governor, though he might not be Vermont’s last non-Democratic governor,” Davis said, noting that other New England states have recently elected independents to gubernatorial and congressional seats.

It’s a statement that doesn’t go over well with Vermont Republicans, but even those active in the party acknowledge that Democrats blew them away when it came to party organization, candidate recruitment, message delivery and at the voting place. The results have Republicans reassessing how they do all those things.

“My hat’s off to them. They did a great job,” Republican Party Chairman Jack Lindley said. “They’re using technology. We’re still using a horse and buggy.”

Whether the Republicans will rebound or are in a steady downward spiral toward becoming a bit player in Vermont politics remains to be seen. Though some claim otherwise, there are signs that the future does not look bright for Republicans in Vermont.

“We have to do a lot of soul-searching, a lot of rebranding,” said Randy Brock, the party’s Republican gubernatorial candidate who lost to first-term incumbent Democrat Peter Shumlin, 58 to 38 percent.

Outgunned

Tuesday night, minutes after the polls closed at 7 p.m., the Associated Press projected, based on exit polling, that Vermont had gone for President Barack Obama and that U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Gov. Peter Shumlin had won. The first two were hardly surprising, but the speedy conclusion about Shumlin‘s victory was the first of many slaps in the face for those at the Republican gathering in Montpelier.

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“That has a tendency to suck the enthusiasm out of the room,” Scott said. “It was obviously very somber.”

Scott, a one-term incumbent whom many on both sides of the aisle describe as a well-liked, moderate Republican, won his own race easily, but with 57 percent of the vote it was not by as wide a margin as expected.

Cassandra Gekas, his Progressive/Democratic opponent, took home 41 percent of the vote. The 30-year-old first-time political candidate who entered the race late received more votes than Republican gubernatorial candidate Randy Brock, who had served as state auditor and a state senator and had been running for more than a year.

“My eyes just glued to that,” Lindley said. “That doesn’t just happen. There is something they have going that we have to do.”

Lindley said party officials are assessing how to catch up to the Democrats’ ground game. He was studying the number of new voters registered and said he’d be looking at who registered them and how.

For Gekas, whose campaign was not highly visible, to receive that many votes against a popular incumbent suggests that a fair number of people voted for her because she had the Democratic Party next to her name.

“I would guess that more than half don’t have a clue who Cass Gekas is,” said Mark Snelling, the Vermont Republican Party treasurer.

There were other indications that Democrats have reached a new audience. Davis, the retired Middlebury College political science professor, said exit polling indicated that Shumlin had a majority of support even in many former Republican safe grounds in Vermont, such as Rutland.

Shumlin had the majority of support among all income levels, according to exit polling. The only demographic that gave a majority of its support to Brock was older men with no college education, Davis noted.

“That’s a declining population,” Davis said, and a sign of things to come for Republicans.

No Republican strongholds

More examples of Republican erosion: Democrats won both state Senate seats in Essex/Orleans counties, where they had held only one before, and a Progressive defeated an incumbent Republican for a House seat in northern Franklin County.

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“There’s no place in the state I can say is monolithically Republican,” Davis said. “I don’t see any circumstance in which a Republican can ever win the presidential vote or a congressional seat in Vermont.”

Similarly, he reached the conclusion that Vermont has seen its last Republican governor.

That governor, Jim Douglas, isn’t so sure that’s true, but he acknowledged a continuing shift in Vermont’s politics.

“The state is becoming more and more inclined to vote Democratic,” Douglas said. He now teaches political science part-time at Middlebury College and said his students are surprised to learn that Vermont was once solidly Republican. “Voting for a Democratic candidate is clearly the default.”

State Sen. Diane Snelling, who comes from a Republican political family and continues to run under the party label in increasingly Democratic Chittenden County, is an eyewitness to the shift.

She won re-election in the six-seat Senate district, but dropped from third place in 2010 to fifth this year. Someday, she said, she might drop the Republican label next to her name.

“I think the R label was a hard one to have,” she said, noting that she felt it this year more than in her previous races. “It was a huge disadvantage to self-identify as a Republican because the party has no value.”

'No room for the middle'

Diane Snelling said she found a growing number of voters firmly on the liberal side who wanted her to commit to issues such as government-run health coverage.

“People wanted you to promise,” she said. “Yes, I want those things, but I want to know how we’re going to pay for it. I find that they need to be done thoughtfully.”

On the flipside, she said, “I’m not welcome by many Republicans because I’m not Republican enough. I felt that more than ever.”

“To me, there was no room for the middle,” Diane Snelling said. “Since I’m in the middle, that was hard.”

George Schiavone’s unsuccessful run for a state House seat representing Shelburne and St. George also offers insight into the shift. Voters in that district elected Schiavone to the seat seven times before he stepped down in 2006. Democrat Joan Lenes won the seat in 2007.

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Still active in the Republican Party, Schiavone set about trying to recruit candidates to run against Lenes this year. He failed to lure anyone into the race, so he decided to run again himself. Both he and Lenes know a lot of people in the district and Schiavone said he thought it would be a close race. He lost, 57-43 percent.

“They just didn’t really want any change in the Legislature,” he said.

Heading into the elections, Democrats held a 94-48 dominance over Republicans in the House. Coming out of the election, that grew to 96-45 Democratic edge.

The future

Difficulty in recruiting candidates, as Schiavone found, is high on the list for Republicans who say they are discussing changes they must make if they want to win elections.

“We do need to build our bench strength,” said Brock, who left the state Senate to run for governor. “We’re talking about that.”

Shumlin, who came up through the Legislature before becoming governor and made his mark by recruiting Democratic Senate candidates in the 1990s, said it’s something Vermont Republicans have been bad at doing as long as he’s been in politics.

“They don’t have much of a bench,” Shumlin said. “I was always amazed at how they let themselves get outworked on recruitment. It really does boil down to recruiting good candidates in the Legislature.”

The Legislature is a proven breeding ground for higher office in Vermont. Every governor since Tom Salmon, who took office in 1973, had served in the Legislature. For House races this year, Republicans had just 74 candidates for 150 seats.

Vermont Democrats this election cycle had paid staff working full-time to recruit candidates, set up a field operation and get out the vote. The Republicans, meanwhile, had no paid party executive director and no recruitment staff.

Lindley, the party chairman, said that when he took the job in February, the party had no money and he had to make decisions about where to put his resources. The party benefited from an arrangement with the Republican National Committee and the Romney campaign under which it received $20,000 a month to serve as a holding tank for campaign contributions. Lindley contended that he’s turned that around and will hire an executive director to start working on the 2014 elections.

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Beyond recruitment, Republicans and observers agree the party has an identity problem.

“It’s hard to figure out what Randy Brock’s overall campaign strategy was,” said Davis, the political scientist. “He struck me as going for the conservative vote.”

Mark Snelling, who was a consultant to Brock’s campaign as well as the party’s treasurer, took issue with that characterization. He said that was an angle that pundits and Democrats pushed that wasn’t true. “If you have an R after your name, a lot of people want to claim you’re right wing,” he said. “The bulk of Republicans in Vermont are moderate.”

Still, Mark Snelling acknowledged that Republicans have to do a better job of making that clear.

Jason Gibbs, who worked for Douglas all eight years he was governor then ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state in 2010, said the party has some work to do to define what it stands for and who it represents. The party should come out with a positive and progressive agenda, and not be willing to settle for being the loyal opposition, or the party of “no.” That includes speaking out against national Republicans when warranted, he said.

“If the party continues to do what it’s been doing, it’s going to get what it’s been getting,” Gibbs said.

He and others argued, however, that there is evidence that the Vermont Republican Party is not dead yet.

While Scott will be the only Republican statewide office-holder next year, it’s happened before. After U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party to become an independent in 2001, Douglas was the lone Republican when he was state treasurer.

“The following year we came roaring back,” Douglas said. Douglas was elected governor in 2002 and Republican Brian Dubie won the lieutenant governor’s seat. They stayed for four terms.

Two years ago, Dubie came within 4,331 votes of winning the governor’s seat, Mark Snelling noted.

Vermont has also long been kind to incumbents, so the odds were in Shumlin’s favor regardless of party. But the state has also in recent decades alternated from a Republican to Democratic governor and back again each time an incumbent has left. If that holds, Republicans have their chance when Shumlin goes.

Davis speculated that Scott could become governor some day, but only if he became an independent.

Despite his sense that the party label is increasingly an albatross, Scott said that’s not in the cards.

“I have no interest in leaving the party,” Scott said. “If I had a strategic plan to be governor maybe I’d have to do that, but I have no plans for that.”